I've been to gamedays well before the timeslot changed (time zone issues and whatnot) and have not been getting on gamedays much mostly because I can't play at those times.
I like gamedays before mostly because it was a good way for a bunch of guys to try out a new map and provide feedback. However on more recent ones it felt more like a bunch of people randomly gathering together. The community has grown and the number of players have as well, and I see some people join gameday and I don't think they're from TF2maps (unless the Steam names change so much that I can't recognize who's who anymore). They'd just play a map, realize it's not what they came for, and leave.
I haven't played much on gameday mostly because of apathy plus the time zone issue, but during earlier days I would post feedback on various maps and take screenies of them to feedback later (or trying the map by myself). I guess I just don't have the motivation now to work on those. But I do have some remaining motivation to make gamedays better.
If we're keeping gameday, I'd like to make two suggestions, which may sound elitist to some. The first one is to make it a password-only server on gameday hours. It's a TF2maps server and the gameday is mostly intended for TF2map members anyway. Pass out the password to the people who are in the group's Steam chat before gameday starts, or through some other means.
Another is to make a "map critique group" of sorts for gameday. This means that perhaps some members volunteer to join gameday if they're able, and provide solid feedback afterwards on their experience, whether by in-game chat or uploading and posting in the thread of that map. How this is set-up, I'm not sure, perhaps we will have some members posting in the respective gameday thread saying that they'll be attending beforehand as a volunteer tester. Or have a group of around 20 people who volunteer to test maps and provide feedback on every map they tried on during gameday. And if you're volunteering, and you played the map, you must provide feedback. There's no real reward for this, but you'll at least get thanked by the mapmaker for providing solid feedback on improving the map.
Is gameday necessary? I think it is, because I'm not a paid member and I don't get to access the server (and is a relatively forgotten member heh), gameday is the only way for me to have people try out my map properly. If gameday is gone, then I don't even get to know what the heck is wrong with my map design-wise or gameplay-wise.
But must quality be a requirement to enroll your map in gameday? Yes, it needs to. To me it's relatively simple. If your map is working fine without a huuuuuuuge gaping exploitable issue that is repeatable (emphasis on repeatable), I would say it's okay, it just needs to be a solid, workable map with all the intended and required entities and functions in the map and working (unless you're trying out a new concept which needs to be playtested). We can't have a map that crashes servers be submitted, we can't have a cp map without a real cp or a ctf map where there's no intel. It'll be a waste of everyone's time and it shows the mapmaker has some issues that he needs to fix before submitting. Obviously, mapmakers may miss on some things. Then it's the gameday player/testers to tell him what's up. But if he made a map before, or at least tried to make a map before and playtested it himself in the game, and it works fine, I think they would normally have at least some idea on what's right/wrong.
How do we determine that though? I don't think ABJ has 48 hours a day (I know ABJ is awesome but he can't twist time, unfortunately) to test out every map that was submitted for gameday. I guess we'll have to work out a solution if we are to have a 'quality bar' set for map submissions.
So that's all I have to ramble. Hopefully all this above would be useful in some form.